The Schwartz Report

New Tools Extend Migration to SharePoint 2016 and Office 365

OneDrive for Business is evolving as the common denominator for all things SharePoint and Office 365. But as that becomes a common repository for data, migrating files and protecting them can be cumbersome. Companies such as AvePoint, EMC, Harmon.ie and Metalogix, say they can make it easier.

In concert with this month's release of SharePoint Server 2016 and Microsoft's new roadmap for the collaboration platform on-premises version and for Office 365, these companies are among those that are offering new tools to build upon what Microsoft offers.

Metalogix unveiled its new Essentials for Drives: File Shares to OneDrive Freemium. As the name suggests, it's a free edition but one that can accommodate a reasonable amount of users and data before the meter starts running.

Organizations can now migrate up to 500 users or 1TB of data to OneDrive for Business. In addition to files and folders, customers can move versions, metadata and permissions from file systems, file shares and network-attached storage (NAS), the company said. The tool, based on the Essentials software offered by MetaVis, which Metalogix acquired last year, can accurately enhance and assign metadata in OneDrive for Business, flatten the file structure and automatically convert folder names into metadata. It also provides detailed logs to verify migrations including failed item reprocessing. Organizations exceeding the freemium parameters can purchase basic, standard and enterprise subscriptions priced respectively at $9, $12 and $15 per user per month.

Harmon.ie, which offers access to SharePoint content in Outlook, has launched a consolidated version of its tool. The namesake offering lets users upload, classify and share e-mails and documents to SharePoint and Office 365 from any e-mail client including the Windows version of Outlook, Outlook on a Mac, the mobile app iterations of Outlook and from Web browsers. The company also added its new App for Outlook Enterprise Edition that lets users automatically add metadata to the Macintosh, mobile apps and the browser when uploading them to SharePoint. Office 365 Group files can now be accessed from the harmon.ie e-mail sidebar. Users can now include e-mail as records in SharePoint for records management.

While Microsoft offers data protection of Office 365 e-mails, calendars and files, data inadvertently or maliciously deleted does not fall under the company's purview -- and there are other limitations as well. EMC offers data protection and restoration offering that it claims lets users intuitively restore lost data from a variety of SaaS offerings including Google Apps, Salesforce.com and now Microsoft's Office 365. The new offering, which costs $48 per user per year, comes under its Spanning brand. Spanning for Office 365 lets customers automate their backups either daily or on a more granular basis. It's designed to allow the end user to restore deleted data and covers all of a users' devices.

A new release of DocAve, migration and compliance software from AvePoint, adds support for SharePoint Server 2016. DocAve 6 SP 7 also lets customers move data from SharePoint Server 2016 and earlier versions (as well as other vendors' collaboration platforms) to Office 365's OneDrive for Business. AvePoint claims it can transfer SharePoint, OpenText LiveLink and file shares five times faster than its earlier version.

SharePoint customers who use Nintex Workflow can use the updated DocAve release to migrate, replicate, and transform their on-premises workflows to Office 365. AvePoint claims DocAve can do so keeping all workflow definitions intact. The new release also supports deployment and management of the new SharePoint Server 2016 release on-premises or on third-party cloud-hosted environments. It also provides enforcement of corporate and regulatory records management policies and requirements.